by Shae Ford
Time passed strangely. The voices disappeared and soon the noises of the nighttime creatures were the only sounds he heard. All the while they traveled, the pressure of Graymange’s hand kept him anchored to the light.
They tried to be gentle. Kael knew by how slowly the hands lowered him to the ground that they were trying desperately not to hurt him. But when his back touched the earth, it was all he could do to hold on.
A sharp flash of pain struck his chest. It’d swelled to the point that he’d begun to fear for his life when the burning suddenly gave way to a cool relief. The patches left his eyes slowly; they drifted back like frost melting from a window’s face as the cold soothed him.
Graymange crouched beside him. He pressed what looked to be a hairy clump of moss into the gash on Kael’s chest, muttering as he worked: “You remember him, don’t you? Yes, this is the one … he is the one responsible …”
Responsible for what? Kael wondered. He didn’t know what he could’ve possibly done to anger the wolf shaman — or if he was even angry at all, for that matter. The way Graymange growled through his words made it impossible to tell.
The longer he listened, the more confused he became.
“Yes, you have him to thank … this is good, but I’ll need more … bring more …”
When another batch of moss cooled the wound on his middle, Kael found the strength to utter a single word: “What …?”
Graymange’s muttering stopped. His head shot over Kael’s, followed by a cluster of other faces. They ringed him so tightly that he couldn’t see anything but their widened eyes — and their wild manes of red hair.
Mountain folk.
Kael gaped at them for several long moments, and the mountain folk gaped back. None of them uttered a single word. He was certain he’d never seen them before …
And yet, their faces looked strangely … familiar.
“Go,” Graymange said to them, waving his hands in wild arcs. “Leave us for a moment. He cannot heal if you sit around and breathe all of his air. You will have your chance to meet him,” he added, in response to what sounded like a low whine. “But for now, he needs quiet and rest.”
The faces drifted away until only Graymange leaned over him. The moonlight paled his skin, but didn’t seem able to chase the dark from his eyes. A wooden medallion hung from his chest, the body of a wolf scrawled into its face. Though the moon couldn’t have possibly reached it, the medallion still glowed with a faint light.
Graymange stared for such a long, unblinking moment that Kael’s skin began to crawl. Perhaps he did mean to kill him.
But he didn’t care. One thought rose above his worries, blotting out all the rest: “Kyleigh,” he whispered, and it was all he had the strength to say.
Graymange never twitched. “We could not reach her in time. She left with the King’s shamans — a bargain for your life. Her fury will be great when she hears how you were beaten.”
Kael didn’t care a whit about his life, and Graymange must’ve seen it.
“Patience, Marked One. You must heal before you rise. If the shamans meant to kill her, they would not have bothered to chain her, I think,” he added, eyes tightening upon Kael’s glare. “No, this King is too fond of his prisons to simply destroy such a powerful creature. He will try to wrap her in his curse … and it will undo him, before the end. Emberfang will vex him greatly.”
His lips pulled back from his teeth in a gesture that would’ve been frightening, had Kael not recognized it as one of his peculiar grins.
The noise of trotting steps drew his eyes away. A creature bounded from the shadows and went straight to Graymange’s side, a hairy clump of moss hanging from its jaws.
It was a dog — the scruffiest excuse for a dog that Kael had ever seen. His ears stood in points and his tail beat the air with exhausting speed as he dropped the moss into Graymange’s hand.
“Thank you, child,” he said, ruffling the scraggily fur between the dog’s ears. “Go sit with the others.”
“Others …?” Kael twisted to watch as the dog trotted into the clump of mountain folk that waited beneath the branches of a tree. He stretched his paws before him and his leg behind him, growing into the form of a young man.
“Surely you remember them. They have not forgotten you,” Graymange said when Kael shook his head. “They have not forgotten what you did for them.”
Those words stirred something in the back of his mind, something that itched above the throb of his wounds. He’d seen mountain folk in the forest once before, what seemed like an age ago …
And all at once, Kael remembered.
These were the villagers they’d rescued from Titus’s grasp — the ones who’d been cursed and bound by the dragonsbane collars. He still remembered how they’d wailed for mercy. He still remembered how desperately they’d fought.
But he realized that he’d never expected to see them again. He thought they would simply flee into the wilds and become lost among the woods.
“They hid from us for a time,” Graymange said quietly. “Newborns are always frightened by the change, at first. But it wasn’t long before they began to seek us out. Each was drawn to the spirit of his shaman, lured by our tokens’ songs. It felt odd at first, to have so many lives to watch over once more. And they are strange little creatures.” His hands pressed down firmly and his voice grew rough as he added: “But they are our creatures, our little spirits. They bring such a light to our woods.”
Kael lay quietly, trying to piece it all together. “These mountain people, these halfdogs … you’ve taken them as your pack?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you said they were Abomination?”
Graymange inclined his head. “A great change has come to our forest. These are strange times, the blooms of a summer I’ve not yet seen — and our world will only grow stranger, before the end. There is no longer any meaning of Abomination that I understand. Perhaps there is no Abomination left at all. But I do not fear this change. No,” he whispered, “I welcome it.”
He looked up when a second dog bounded from the woods: a floppy-eared giant with a thick, drooping face. The moss he dropped into Graymange’s hand was quite a bit damper than the batch before.
But that didn’t stop the wolf shaman from wrapping a thin arm around the dog’s folds. He dragged his great body against his side. “I have never been more pleased to be wrong.” He pressed his cheek against the dog’s dripping snout, smiling to either ear. “This is not the face of Abomination. No, this is the happy smile of a friend.”
“Well, I’m glad it all worked out,” Kael said absently. He was feeling well enough that he thought he might be able to start working on his ribs. He felt down the shattered row to his belt — and realized with a jolt that his scabbard was empty. “You have to get my sword. The King can’t find it.”
“He won’t. We’ve buried it well.”
Graymange sounded rather pleased with himself, but Kael couldn’t believe it. “You can’t bury it! I need that sword — it’s going to get lost!”
“We bury things so that they may be found, Marked One. A treasure may only be lost if it is left out in the open. Heal yourself,” he growled over the top of Kael’s protests. “It is important to us that you are healed.”
“Why?”
“Why?” Graymange stared at him for a moment before he inched around to Kael’s head.
The wolf shaman’s hands lifted him gently, but Kael still ground his teeth against the pain. His eyes blurred for a moment, smearing the land around him. It was only when his body got used to the angle that his vision cleared.
And what he saw stole his breath.
They were near the banks of a river. He could see its flesh glittering in the moonlight. A small plot of land sat beyond the river — completely shadowed, save for the tree growing atop its middle.
Perhaps it was only a trick of the moon, but Kael swore the tree’s bark shone with a stark white light. He hardly had a moment
to wonder before his eyes were drawn to something else.
The dogs weren’t alone. A horde of shapechangers filled the land between Kael and the tree. He recognized the hulking shoulders and hairy chest of the bear shaman immediately, sitting cross-legged among a gathering of badgers, and the snarling creatures that were a mix between wolf and bear.
The hawk shaman watched him from the trees, her legs dangling over oblivion. Eagles and magpies slept contently in the branches above her. A small clump of owls perched at her side, blinking their enormous eyes.
A lioness was draped atop the rocks to his left, surrounded by cats with mere tufts for tails and others with white, spotted fur. He wasn’t sure what exactly was hidden inside the maw of a rotted tree: all he could see were dozens of glowing eyes, gathered around a pair that were set a little wider than the rest.
Not a one of them made so much as a sound. They stared at Kael with looks as open and welcoming as stone. He had no idea what they were thinking, or why they watched him so intently.
Then Graymange spoke:
“When our people were taken from us, we knew our stories had reached their ends. The shamans would drift through the forest like shadows, like wraiths. We would never again dwell in the company of our flocks and packs. We would wander and die alone — we were certain of this future, at peace with it, even. And all of these things would’ve come to pass … had it not been for your meddling.
“The Forsaken One changed our story, did he not?” Graymange turned his stare upon the others, listening as their feathers ruffled and their claws scraped through the dirt. “A strange thing happened to us when his shadow crossed our path. Now our flocks are full, our packs are whole. There are little lights in our forest once again.”
Kael didn’t breathe as the shamans stared him down. The swamps had gone so still that even the frogs stopped their croaking.
“Heal yourself, Marked One,” Graymange said again, after a long moment of silence. “You must rise and march upon the King. You must free Emberfang from the curse. And we will stand at your side,” he added with a growl. “The shapechangers owe you far more than our lives.”
*******
The room was growing darker even as the fire closed in. Crevan watched the shadows dance across the charred back of the hearth, his hands clenched against the voice that sputtered from their depths:
I’m going to teach you, Crevan. I’m going to show you how to —
“Your Majesty?”
He spun from the hearth. The air whipped across the cold film of sweat that’d formed upon his brow and sent a chill down his neck. But he forced it away.
There were far greater worries to be dealt with, a problem that kept growing despite his every attempt to quash it — a chill that he feared would quickly swell into a storm.
“What do you mean, they were melted?” Crevan snapped.
“I’m only telling you what I’ve heard.” Jacob squinted at the beams across the ceiling for a moment, his head tilted to the side and his eyes distant. “The spy will be here shortly … he says he’s bringing proof.”
Crevan didn’t want proof. He wanted that little whelp dead.
The echo of his steps pounded against the throne room walls, bounced off the bricked-in faces of the windows. The pacing helped steady him. It helped keep the madness at bay, helped his mind to stay sharp.
There was no escaping the tales. The things that’d happened in the Valley resonated inside the ears of every creature trapped beneath Ulric’s curse: an army of warriors that magic couldn’t touch, led by a man who split bodies with his bare hands — the great and terrible voice that’d been the last sound of the battle.
The cursed seemed unable to forget it. They’d worried over it until their whispering drove Crevan mad. He ordered them all into silence — and for a moment, the castle had been still.
But soon the trouble in the Valley crept across its borders and into the greater realm. There was a force moving across the land that Crevan hadn’t been expecting, a strange resistance he hadn’t been able to stop: his army burned in Lakeshore, got crushed at the seas. Even the company stationed in Harborville had lost its grip.
Though this new battlemage, Jacob, proved strong enough to carry Ulric’s chains, he came at a price. Crevan had lost some of his best mages — and a good number of his birds — in the battle to capture him.
But more disturbing than anything else, all of this seemed to happen without the Dragongirl’s help. Up until a few days ago, she’d been hiding out of his reach. Then she crossed into the Kingdom precisely where Argon said she would — and her capture had been easy.
But when Ulric returned from the swamps, he brought a new tale with him … and a letter that made Crevan’s blood turn cold.
He’d burned it, of course. He’d ripped it from Ulric’s hands and thrown it straight into the hearth. It was hours before the whispercraft wore off, hours before Ulric stopped blubbering about being late and told him of the young man who traveled with the Dragongirl: a mountain man who’d fallen from the clouds, survived a dragon’s blow — a warrior who carried a strange, burning sword.
Crevan would not be shaken. He convinced himself that it must’ve been the whispercraft that muddled Ulric’s head, that the mages in the Valley had been mistaken. Now that he had the Dragongirl in chains, the Kingdom was his. Nothing could stand in his path.
Still … one tiny, scraping thought kept him awake.
Ulric seemed convinced that the young man would die from his wounds. But just to be certain, Crevan had sent a northern patrol to find him, to finish him. Once he saw that whelp’s severed head, he could rest.
He refused to believe that his patrol had been melted.
While Crevan paced, Jacob stood unflinching before the throne. The blues of his eyes were dim and almost always squinched. His thin arms hung limply from his shoulders. There wasn’t a thing about him that made Crevan think he was anything more than a sickly, bookish man. But he must’ve possessed some sort of power, because the chained impetus hadn’t destroyed him.
It squirmed contentedly across his wrist; heat flared inside the silver as the creatures bound to its links began to wake. Jacob seemed to be listening intently to their voices. His lips moved along their words …
Crevan stopped. There was a distinct pattern in the motion of Jacob’s mouth. He wasn’t listening to the cursed — no, he was speaking. He was saying the same thing over and over again. After a moment of watching, Crevan recognized the words:
The burning sword … the burning sword … the burning —
“Stop!”
Jacob leapt back at Crevan’s shout. The chains burst into an angry, fiery red. He clutched his wrist to his chest, gasping: “He’s here.”
For one heart-stopping moment, the madness consumed him. It made him fear the worst. Crevan ripped his sword from its sheath and swung it at the man coming through the open door — stopping a mere inch from his throat.
It was a steward. He was short and had a blemish that looked a bit like an inkblot growing just above his upper lip. He kept his hands tucked behind his back as he spoke. “Forgive me, Your Majesty. But you did tell me — in the strictest confidence — that I should come straight in the moment your scout arrived.”
The steward stepped to the side before Crevan could remember saying any of that, making room for one of the birds to crawl through.
It was half crow and half man — a monster with skin swollen around clumps of glossy black feathers. Sharp bones poked out from its overgrown nose and chin. The growth had so taxed its features that its face seemed lopsided, with one of its shining black eyes perched high above the other. But more unsettling than all of that were the monster’s wounds.
Its bare spots were covered in a patchwork of scratches and scrapes — and there were far more bare patches than there’d been before.
The crow monster hobbled by, moving with its wings and talons in a way that reminded Crevan of a spider crawling across the
floor. “What happened?” He blanched at a spot between the monster’s shoulders, where some of its feathers had been torn away — leaving three weeping holes behind.
The crow went straight to Jacob. It filled the room with its shrieks and caws.
“He’d only just landed in the woods when he was set upon by a pack of animals.”
“Wolves?”
“Among other things,” Jacob said with a nod. He listened as the crow shrieked again. “Cats … badgers … a bear and a fox —”
“I don’t need to know about every blasted animal,” Crevan said through his teeth. Even as he glared, his fists began to shake. “What about my patrol?”
“He found their bodies in the swamps. Their armor was melted where it’d been hewn, and their bones were charred black,” Jacob said flatly, as if it was no more interesting a thing than the passing of a cloud.
The steward stepped forward. “Perhaps seeing it for yourself will help, Your Majesty. The crow was carrying this in his talons, when he returned.”
The steward brought his hands out from behind his back and held them towards Crevan. It was the front of a breastplate — and it had indeed been melted. There was an unmistakable weld across its middle, where its bottom half had been cut away.
The oddest thing about it though was the fact that the black dragon was gone from its front. The crest had been smeared into the metal until it resembled nothing more than a blob … and scrawled through the black was a crest he’d hoped to never see again:
An eye with three interlocking triangles at its base, three triangles fanning from its top, and one triangle directly in the center.
The symbol of the Wright.
CHAPTER 47
The Battle Begins
The fortress of Midlan was a beast without equal. Its eight outer walls towered above the trees, each one stretching the full length of a village. They tore from the ground with indisputable might.
Elena led Braver to the crest of a hill, her jaw dropping further with his every plodding step. The falling sun set the western wall aflame. The light that bounced off its unblemished surface made it glow. For now, the land before her was perfectly illuminated by the glint of the wall.
